20220130 E4C - Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30 - The traveling mindset
“Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor,” wrote Abraham Heschel.
God is raging in the prophet’s words. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of a prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. Divine power bursts in his words. The authority of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.[1]
The prophets, all of them, it seems, aren’t eager to take the call, they resist the divine Presence that takes over their voice, their life. “Who am I that I should go to Pharao?” said Moses. “I have never been eloquent… I am slow of speech and slow of tongue… please send someone else,” he begged.[2] “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy,” we hear Jeremiah protest, no doubt with trembling in his voice. And the Lord replies, “Do not be afraid of them,” confirming without any subtlety that there would be “they” to be afraid of, and promising, “I am with you to deliver you.”[3]
No prophet wants to be a prophet. The mission is God’s initiative, and the call is inescapable. Jeremiah groans, “If I say, ‘I will not mention [the Lord], or speak any more in [God’s] name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”[4]Silence becomes fire in the bones and speaking means giving voice to what few are eager to hear and what some clearly do not want to be audible at all. Jeremiah would speak in the name of God, and after a few episodes he would be prohibited from entering the temple, and he would tell his friend Baruch to write his words on a scroll and read them to the people coming to the temple, and a group of officials would confiscate the scroll and take it to King Jehoiakim, and the king would have the scroll read to him, and pen knife in hand, he would cut the scroll column by column and toss it into the fire.[5] Enough of that nonsense.
The invisible God who wants to become audible can count on the prophet’s dogged determination, but not on hearts even half as willing to listen as the prophet is willing to speak. Heschel wrote,
The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words.[6]
Now let’s turn to Nazareth. Jesus had returned from the wilderness to Galilee, filled with the Holy Spirit, and he began to teach. He was praised by everyone, we read in Luke. His were words people wanted to hear. His were words people ate up like bread. His were words in which the invisible God became audible; his proclamation, some would soon begin to say, made the invisible God visible and tangible. His authority wasn’t based on credentials, it came from the Presence he revealed.
Jesus came to Nazareth, and on the Sabbath day he went to the synagogue and taught. He read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, beautiful words about being anointed and sent to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and the year of the Lord’s favor—and Jesus let the Lord’s favor be the last word: he didn’t read the conclusion of the passage that announces the day of God’s vengeance. And for those with ears to hear, what he didn’t say was just as important as what he said. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And that was all he could say for a while, because the people in the synagogue were busy talking with each other about the gracious words that came from his mouth.
“Today,” he said, “fulfilled.” The good people of Nazareth loved Jesus’ proclamation of good news to the poor because they were poor, and they had waited so long for redemption and release—and there he sat, Joseph’s boy, speaking of fulfillment, announcing an end to their captivity and oppression. What a happy Sabbath it was in Nazareth! Not for long, though. With every additional word that came from his mouth, Jesus antagonized his audience. “Doubtless you will quote to me…” He talked about the proverbial doctor and their expectation that he do in his hometown the things they had heard he’d done in Capernaum. Those things, healings presumably, and perhaps even greater things since this was his home after all, they were his people, weren’t they?
But he was no doctor, he was the prophet who proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor. He briefly mentioned a couple of stories they knew, stories about two of the great prophets of old.
There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.
That was all he said, but it stung. The stories of God’s prophets bringing bread and hope to a widow across the border, and, in the case of Naaman, healing and new life to an enemy general—the stories didn’t stir up joy, but resentment and rage. The good people of Nazareth thought that when he spoke of fulfillment “today” it meant that “their day” had finally come, and they couldn’t bear the thought that on this day of fulfillment, their town wasn’t God’s hometown any more than the rest of the world. Filled with amazement when Jesus began his sermon, they were filled with rage when they violently ended his teaching, driving him out of the town, ready to kill him. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way, Luke tells us.
Jesus didn’t go on his way because the people of Nazareth rejected him—it was rather the other way round: they rejected him because he refused to let himself be defined by their expectations; they rejected him because he insisted on his way of fulfillment. In a way the scene foreshadows the entirety of Jesus’ proclamation of God’s gracious reign. One moment we are amazed at the gracious words he speaks, and then we’re ready to silence him, whatever it may take, because we can’t handle the freedom of his sovereign grace and the wide expanse of his boundless mercy. We’re no less tempted than the good people of Nazareth to think of ourselves as God’s own hometown. Peter Marty writes in the Christian Century,
I’m troubled by the sharp rise of White grievance and resentment in America. It doesn’t take much to spot the politicians and pundits who use coded language, dog whistles, and conspiratorial tweets to fuel this resentment.
And for far too many, grievance and resentment have shifted to “a fear-based panic that typically involves some form of rage.” Marty writes,
It’s no easy task to propose a change of mind to aggrieved White folks. What seem to me like obvious Christian impulses for inspiring a more gracious embrace of human diversity end up having little impact on resentment-filled White people.
Sitting with that helplessness, Marty remembered a conversation he had with travel host Rick Steves. “Travel is a way to broaden perspective,” Steves said with his usual cheerfulness. “It makes us more tolerant. It challenges our ethnocentricity. It inspires us to celebrate diversity.” And then he dug a little deeper into the crisis of people scared by growing diversity and other demographic changes in our society, saying,
Fear, to me, is for people who don’t get out very much. If you take the most frightened people we know in our communities, I bet they’re the people who travel the least. They’re not interested in enlarging their understanding of others. They don’t know what it means to be surrounded by other people who look and think differently.
Steves didn’t quote Mark Twain then, but it would have been a perfect fit. Twain famously wrote in Innocents Abroad,
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of [people] and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Talking with Marty, Steves acknowledged that, “not everybody can travel, of course. But,” he added, “there are a thousand ways to have a traveling mindset.”[7]
We aren’t so different from the good people of Nazareth. We have a deep-seated desire for Jesus to come to our hometown and do here the things we heard he has done elsewhere, but he comes to us, again and again, to invite us to be on the way with him—to bless us with the traveling mindset of those who follow him.
“Let there be a grain of prophet in everyone!” wrote Heschel. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” cried Moses on the long journey to the land of promise.[8] And according to the prophet Joel, God declared,
I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.[9]
Jesus’ Spirit-driven proclamation of God’s gracious reign continues with those on whom God has poured out the power from on high; it continues with the multi-ethnic, polyglot, and cross-cultural traveling assembly we know as the church. Inspired to dream and empowered to serve, we are called to be on the way with Jesus.
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[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings; quote from a review by John Dear at http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/abraham-heschels-prophetic-judaism
[2] Exodus 3:11; 4:10,13
[3] Jeremiah 1:6, 8
[4] Jeremiah 20:9
[5] Jeremiah 36
[6] Heschel; see note above.
[7] Peter W. Marty, “White Fear,” The Christian Century, January 26, 2022; online at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/editorpublisher/there-antidote-white-grievance
[8] Numbers 11:29
[9] Joel 2:28-29